The Diminishing Returns for Longer Healthcare Provider Video Biographies: A Thin Slice Examination of Patient Decision-Making

ABSTRACT

The consumer-centric nature of the current healthcare landscape in the United States is forcing healthcare organizations to innovate novel ways to help patients more efficiently and effectively select their healthcare providers to improve the patient experience. One way organizations are doing this is by providing introductory videos of their providers online to help patients informatively shop for new providers. However, producing videos – especially lengthy ones – for all providers within an organization can be both time consuming and expensive, with costs inevitably trickling down to patients. Framed by the concepts of thin slicing from the psychological sciences, and uncertainty reduction from the communication sciences, the primary purpose of this 12-condition online experiment (n = 1,310) was to determine the optimal length of healthcare providers’ introductory biographical videos in-terms of patients’ ease of selection, and the impact that video length can have on patients’ provider perceptions. Results reveal that introductory videos of around 46-seconds, as well as shorter videos with supplemental text, provide similar results on dependent variables such as selection ease, patient satisfaction, and trust, as do longer videos. Additional recommendations for applying these findings within healthcare organizations are discussed.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by startup funds provided by Purdue University, College of Liberal Arts.

Notes

1. Only the missing information, not the entirety of the text biography, was provided so that participants were not exposed to redundant information across both the text and video. Cue summation theory (Severin, 1967) posits that when combining multiple channels of communication, additional content should be complementary and not redundant.